Been Playing Rift

Rift.

  Do you even Rift, bro? Well, I certainly do. Rift is an absolutely delightful game from Trion Worlds. It's equipped with a large dynamic world, seamless zones, lots (LOTS) of character customization, dungeons, raids and chronicles, oh my. To top it off it is free to play. All this goodness is not without flaw as usual, but let's break it down.

  The world in Rift is very large, filled with tons of quests and content like rifts, in example. These are like random public events that spawn at random points on the map, that everyone playing can take part in. These can also chain into larger world events. The world events are massive in scale and will take a ton of people to complete. After knocking out a few of the invasions and other challenges, a world boss will spawn and then you have to kill it. There are multiple world events per zone, so it makes the world feel so dynamic and fun!

  There are also an insane amount of character customization going on here too, and I don't mean just what your race and hairstyle is going to be. You can really get into your character and flesh 'em out. A lot of this is made possible by the "Calling" system, which is rifts version of classes/talents. So you pick from one of 4 callings Mage, Warrior, Priest or Rogue. Within each calling are several souls, or styles/talent trees, if you prefer, of which you can choose 3. I'll use Rogue as example, so I might grab the Assassin and Bard souls, and I can go stealth around and play music, I kid...but you really can mix and match like that and each soul feels very unique.

  Like dungeons and raids? Rift has you covered there also, there is an absolutely massive amount of dungeons and raids in this game. There are even expert mode versions of most,which you can already guess is a much harder experience. Even if you out level a certain dungeon, no worries, you can just scale down to that dungeons level in the robust group finder tool. Maybe you don't want to play with a bunch of random people but it's just you and a friend online at the time? No worries, you can just go into a chronicle together, chronicles are essentially just little instanced story areas that are tuned for solo or duo players.

  Now, having said all that positive stuff, shall we get down to the dirt? The cash shop, while really well done, can be really expensive, though most of the items are just convenience it can feel questionable at times. The combat feels a bit sluggish at times as well and the macro system (once you learn it well) can make some classes feel like a one button smasher. There are also quite a few little complaints I could make but none too serious.

  At the end of the day, Rift is a great free to play title, with lots of regularly updated content that will keeps you busy for quite some time. If you have not already given this title a go, I really suggest you give it a try. You can download Rift for free on Steam!